If you’ve ever walked into The Rave/Eagles Club in Milwaukee, you know the place already feels like a time capsule... Ornate architecture up top, sweat-soaked history in the halls, and a lineup résumé that reads like a festival poster. But deep below the stages and dressing rooms is the venue’s most mythical backstage artifact: a drained, old underground swimming pool that’s become a living scrapbook of touring history, covered in autographs, notes, doodles, and one-liners from artists who left their mark in Milwaukee.
This isn’t just some random concrete room where bands kill time. The pool is a leftover from the building’s earlier life as the Fraternal Order of Eagles’ clubhouse, which opened in 1927, an era when a massive indoor pool in a private social club was the ultimate flex. Over the decades, the building evolved into the multi-room concert complex Milwaukee knows today, but the pool remained, eventually drained, sealed off from regular foot traffic, and re-born as something far more culturally valuable than chlorine: a backstage rite of passage.
From Swimming Lanes to Signatures
The pool itself is often described as underground and backstage, and it’s long been the subject of venue lore, part architectural curiosity, part ghost story, part rock’n’roll museum you can’t quite visit like a normal exhibit. When artists and crews started hearing about it, the question became inevitable: “Wait… there’s a pool down there?” Musicians asked. Staff showed them. And as stories go, that simple curiosity turned into tradition... Sign the walls, sign the ceiling, sign the inside of the pool, leave proof you were here.
Today, the pool area is packed with inscriptions that function like an alternative timeline of touring history. Names you grew up on, names you discovered last week, and names that only make sense if you’ve lived your life with venue flyers on your bedroom wall. Milwaukee Record’s coverage of the venue’s “Haunted Holidays” tour describes the pool as having “thousands of signatures from artists across the world” spread across the space.
And it’s not just legacy rock lore. The signatures span generations and genres... Pop, rap, metal, indie, electronic—because The Rave/Eagles Club itself is built like a multi-stage ecosystem. One night it’s a scream-along punk crowd. The next, it’s a chart-topping pop star. That variety is exactly why the pool works as a cultural guestbook: it’s not curated by a museum—it’s curated by the road.
Who Gets to Sign the Pool?
Here’s where the pool shifts from “cool hidden room” to status symbol. According to Milwaukee Record’s reporting, artists earn the chance to sign the inside of the pool by selling out The Rave. That detail matters, because it frames the signatures as more than graffiti... They’re milestones.
It’s the venue saying: you didn’t just pass through; you built something here. Milwaukee crowd showed up, again and again, until the relationship between artist and city became permanent enough to write on concrete.
That’s why certain signatures get talked about like landmarks. Milwaukee Record notes you can spot inscriptions from artists such as Ke$ha, Machine Gun Kelly, Alice In Chains, and T-Pain in the pool space. And other coverage points out the tradition continuing with newer headliners, Jelly Roll and Olivia Rodrigo get mentioned as artists who’ve added their names to the walls.
Even the pool’s acoustics have become part of the mythology. The idea that it’s not just a place to sign, but a strange echo chamber where artists can sing into the concrete and hear it come back different, has become part of the story told about it.
The Pool’s “Haunted” Reputation (and Why That Adds to the Myth)
A venue like this doesn’t stay legendary on setlists alone, it becomes legend through story. And the pool has story for days.
Local coverage has described reported paranormal experiences in the basement pool area... Phantom footsteps, cold air, the smell of bleach even though the pool has been drained for years, and stories of a child’s laughter in the hallways nearby. Whether you take that literally or as the psychological effect of being in a sealed-off underground space with decades of history baked into it, the result is the same:
And that vibe matters. Because when an artist signs a wall in a room that’s already wrapped in myth, architecture, rumor, tragedy, and tour history. The inscription becomes something bigger than ink. It becomes ritual.
The Mac Miller Wall Moment: A Signature That Turned Into a Pilgrimage
Among all the tags and names, one message gets singled out again and again by fans: Mac Miller’s note inside the pool.
Milwaukee Record calls it a “famous quote,” and describes staff pointing it out as a favorite signature during the Haunted Holidays experience. Fans circulate photos of it online for a reason: it doesn’t read like a quick autograph. It reads like Mac doing what he always did.. Dropping a heavy idea with a wink, letting humor and mortality sit in the same sentence.
"I am Mac Miller. I once lived now I am dead, my soul remains here.
Enjoy...
P.S. I sold this place out 3 times."
There’s a second layer that fans can’t ignore: Mac later released an album titled Swimming and his most iconic backstage message in Milwaukee lives inside an empty pool. Even if that connection is just poetic coincidence, it’s the kind of coincidence that sticks to a fanbase forever. (It’s not hard to see why people treat this wall like a shrine.)
What makes Mac’s pool message so uniquely powerful is that it’s performative without being fake. It reads like he’s writing a scene into the building: If this place is haunted, then let me be one of the ghosts. And now, years later, fans visit The Rave/Eagles Club and ask about it the way people ask about a mural or a memorial. It’s become part of the venue’s guided storytelling, not just an internet artifact.
Why This Pool Matters in Music History (and Why Milwaukee Owns It)
Every major city has venues that “made” artists in the regional sense, rooms where careers leveled up because crowds were loud, local radio cared, and touring routes kept returning. The Rave/Eagles Club pool is physical evidence of that relationship.
A signed wall is a snapshot: we played here.
A signed wall inside a hidden pool that only some artists ever see is a statement: we mattered here.
And Milwaukee’s role isn’t passive in that equation. The sellout threshold (as reported) implies something deeper: the city didn’t just witness shows—it helped build history.
That’s why the pool is such a perfect symbol for a venue like The Rave/Eagles Club. Up top, the venue hosts the performance you came for. Down below, the building keeps receipts.
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